my opinion relative to the accounts left us by Moses; and from them you will have learnt, that I, at least, am not of that preposterous confederacy, which would indiscriminately deny every thing. But, is it to be controverted, that one half at least of the period from the creation, is involved in darkness, fabie, and ignorance? From the commencement of the Persian empire, we may date about one thousand years of ancient history, including the republics of Athens and Rome about one thousand years from the fall of the Roman empire in the west, to the discovery of America; and the remainder will scarcely complete three centuries of the modern state of Europe and of mankind.

Móreover, much of the history given us by Moses, particularly Genesis, appears manifestly to have been compiled. The first, and the principal events which he records, had happened at least two thousand four hundred and thirty-three years before he was born; a period almost as long as from the foundation of Rome to the present day. What he relates, therefore, he could not have personally been acquainted with; nor are we any where told, that such knowledge was communicated to him by revelation. In no one part of Genesis does he speak,

but as the simple historian. But, this is not the case in the other books of the Pentateuch, when he delivers himself in the name of God, and with the spirit of a prophet. The whole series of facts, from the creation to the deluge, he seems to have gathered either from records or tradition, and to have faithfully set them down as he found them. The accounts themselves, it is allowable for us to believe, to have been various; else how are we to reconcile the frequent and unnecessary repetitions that we meet with? Genesis is very short, and yet the same thing is repeated again and again. An able man, like Moses, would not of his own accord, have run into glaring tautology. But, the most learned writers are agreed upon this point; nor is the suggestion improbable, that Moses might have inserted the different accounts he had collected, in separate columns, as Origen did afterwards the Holy Scriptures, for comparison; and as has often since been practised in the arrangement of the harmony of the four Evangelists. After the captivity, indeed, inaccuracies might have crept in, oing to the ignorance or inattention of the tri cribers of the law. Commentators also universally agree, that the anacronisms, as well as the inconsistencies, in the book of Genesis, are manifold. All this, however, does not take away

I

from

from the veneration we ought to have for the first book of the Pentateuch of Moses. There is no necessity of religion, nor any dictate of political morality, which should make us tenacious of the now exploded opinion, in lege neque prius, neque posterius esse. The very

errors which may be discovered, may fairly be considered as so many evidences of authenticity. A wise man, such as the legislator of the Jews, would not have ventured at a bungling fabrication, when the various traditions, or histories of the creation of the world, of the deluge, of the lives of the Patriarchs, and particularly of Abraham, were perhaps as well known to the whole nation, as to himself. This book of Genesis, therefore, this pell-mell narration, as it has been unwittily called by Spinoza, has, with its hoary age, the strongest possible claims to admiration and respect.

Man and his works are fleeting. His art, however, is able to construct monuments far more permanent than the narrow span of his own existence: yet these monuments, like himself, are perishable and frail; and in the boundless annals of time, his life and his labours must equally be measured as a passing moment. The pyramids of Egypt, built two thousand years

M 4

be

fore

fore Christ, * were the wonders of the ancients. For an hundred generations, the leaves of Autumn have dropt into the grave; and after the fall of the Pharaohs and Ptolomies, the Cæsars and Caliphs, the same pyramids stand erect and unshaken above the floods of the Nile. As so many islands, they stand in a state of solitude and safety. Yet, they too shall fall. All sublunary things have undergone their respective revolutions; they have had their dawn, their meridian light, and their decline into obscurity. At one moment, they have emerged from the profound abyss; in their progress they have flourished for a season; but at length have lost themselves in the gloom of an eternal oblivion.

The catastrophe of a deluge is indelibly marked on the face of nature. But I have ventured to suppose that disaster to have happened to an anterior earth, not to this; on the contrary, that this earth, on the waters rushing into the mighty caverns of the deep, then shewed itself in its present form. Nor, indeed, is it a modern opinion, that the sea once covered our earth. Aristotle asserts, that both continents and seas undergo a circuitous change, dry land succeeding to water, and water to dry land.

The

Sir John Marsham.

+ Gibbon.

The Chinese have a tradition of a mighty island swallowed up in the ocean; and the Orientals have a tradition, that beyond the ocean there was a land, which rose to the walls of heaven; and that man was born in that land, the terrestrial paradise. How is it that thus from Athens to Pekin, thence to India, and for more than thirty centuries, there should have been the same idea of a great island suddenly destroyed and buried under the waters? This island is said to have been situated opposite to the pillars of Hercules, and to have been of greater extent than Lybia and Asia joined together * On the division of the earth by the gods, it is said, it was given to Neptune, who found in it, on a little mountain, one man and one woman, who were formed of the clay on which they stood. This island abounded in fertility and all sorts of riches, particularly metals. The temples were cased with gold; and the pavements were made of silver. But you will tell me this was all a philosophical romance of Plato. I do not altogether consider it as such in regard to the existence of the land; for I have, I think, satisfactorily proved, that some very extensive island or continent must have existed, while the most elevated parts of the present surface

of

* Plato.